Microsoft Agrees to Buy Code Sharing Site GitHub

According to recent reports, Microsoft Inc. has agreed to buy popular code repository company GitHub. People familiar with the matter inform that the deal could be announced at the earliest. GitHub choose to sell the company rather than going public and choose Microsoft because, according to a person who asked not to identify his name, it was impressed by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

The terms of agreement are not known as of now. GitHub was last valued in 2015 at $2 billion. The acquisition will provide a new way forward to the San Francisco based company GitHub which is trying for over nine months to find a new CEO and is still to make some profits through its service that allows coders to share and collaborate their work.

The deal will also help Microsoft to add new programming tools and tie up with a company which has become an important part of the way Microsoft writes its own software. Until recently, Microsoft has been increasingly dependent on open-source software. Both Microsoft and GitHub didn’t return any requests for comment on the proposed deal.

GitHub is known the world over as an essential tool for coders and Microsoft and Google use GitHub to store their corporate code as to collaborate as well. It is kind of a social network for coders. While GitHub has made a revenue of over $98 million in 2016 for nine months, its losses for the year have also been significant – it lost over $66 million during the three quarters in the same year.

Last August, GitHub has made an announcement that it is looking for a new CEO to replace Chris Wanstrath who is also one of the co-founders of the company. In the meantime, the company’s Chief Business Officer Julio Avalos joined GitHub’s board of directors and took care of the day-to-day leadership of the company. Microsoft has also had talks for over a few years. While the talks began initially about partnership between the two, they were later progressed to discussing about an acquisition rather than a partnership.

GitHub hosts over 27 million software developers who work on more than 80 million repositories of code and Microsoft openly opposed such a kind of open-source software development. It is now one of the biggest contributors to GitHub. Satya Nadella is seen increasingly moving the company away from being dependent on just Windows OS and focusing on more in-house development of Linux. If everything goes well, the acquisition will pave new ways for the company to connect with the vast community of developers.